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Nov 10 Fear and Becoming an Adult

Adulthood began with the heavens opening, a waterfall pouring over my piano in the living room. A broken pipe (maintenance suspects that it was a sabotaged pipe) connected to the upstairs neighbor's shower was the culprit. Ceiling tiles fell and broke upon the piano, the ivory keys using their last bit of life to indignantly testify against their perpetrator. Unfortunately, this is the third time that bathroom has flooded into my apartment this year.

The same evening, my middle-aged neighbor, who is addicted to a variety of drugs, came to my door asking for a knife. As I stood there, I realized that I wasn't even worried considering it isn't even the strangest request from a neighbor I have gotten at 1 am. He claimed someone broke into his apartment, damaging the lock. Somehow, he thought a butter knife would help the predicament and denied my request to call the police to report the break-in. I doubted that the lock was really what he wanted to use the knife on, and I've always looked strange in jumpsuits, so I sent him away muttering only to hear him breaking into his apartment through the basement window.

I can't help but wonder if these are all signs—the world above me falling in on itself and my neighbor politely asking for a knife to murder me with as I politely stand in my entryway. Maybe I take concrete things too abstractly but I always want to know that I'm making the right decisions. Now that I'm graduating college, the stress to make all the right decisions is heightened. It feels like if I make one wrong step now, people will shake their heads because they knew I would never be able to accomplish my lengthy list of goals. I don’t want to be known as the girl who failed because she didn’t have whatever “it” is.

If college is like being suspended in gravity, then That First Year is the fall to planet earth. You know you’re falling but you’re not sure when you will reach full impact or what the damage will be. In an effort to minimize what I assume will be utter destruction, I try too hard to pretend my heart has not dropped down to my stomach in anxiety. The mere thought of a 40-hour, 9-5 work week makes me nauseous. I’ve even lost count of the number of times I have woken myself up from a falling dream because my legs jerk up to my eyeballs.

What I’m beginning to understand though, is that I don’t need to try to make a parachute out of thin air or even get one of those little umbrella hats to wear in my apartment. Instead, I need to lean into those hard times when everything seems to be in mid-air and allow the impact to break my shell and find out what I’m really made of. When I think worst case scenario I am forgetting that I am my best case scenario. Worst case scenario is doubting my resiliency and determination to do the hard work to develop myself personally and professionally. Becoming the CEO of my own company could start by making good little decisions, like not giving away butter knives at my door.

You should just drive across the country,” she said lightheartedly, and laughter ensued. Drive across the country, what an absurd idea. But then the joke got taken one step too far and all of a sudden we were plotting about who would pay my rent for a month and where I could stop to stay the night in Oklahoma and Arizona and California. Suddenly, I was calling my parents and asking if I would still be allowed to come home for Christmas if I made a rather (arguably) reckless decision and drove my tired, thirteen-year-old car across the country. (It took some negotiation but I am, indeed, still allowed to come home.) We sat in a coffee shop for an hour and hammered out the plan and concluded that there really wouldn’t be one, that sometimes you have to take a leap, whether or not it looks like a promising landing, and whether or not people are going to speculate about where your mind might have run off to.

Just as you can imagine, college graduation season is packed with all the emotions. You feel relief, excitement, stress and pride. The emotion most people don’t associate with graduation and what I didn’t expect to feel, though, is regret.

Since taking that first step, I’ve made the trip back to speak in numerous classes and even at other events. Yes, the introvert in me still needs plenty of time to recover after public speaking. But every time I went back to campus, it got easier. With every step—every time I said “yes” when I wanted to say “no”—I gained momentum.

That’s another great thing about baby steps: every step you take builds momentum—stamina to keep going, strength for the journey.

In all seriousness, though, I felt like I had transported right back to where I was my senior year, caught in the in-between of trying to hold on so tightly to those last few months of my life as a student, and looking so forward to venturing out of it. But it brought back that old familiar, restless feeling—the same feeling I had when I got back from London, and when I first moved here—of wanting so many things and trying to figure out a way to make them all coexist.

Between stressing for Walter White’s father-of-the-year-campaign and my ambiguous job future, the happy hours continued. I have the utmost appreciation for these friends that took me out of my own darkness and enjoyed a beer or two. We treasured our three dollar drinks, our pita and chips, our half off cocktails, our half off wines, our chances to escape the pressures of “do you have a job yet?” and the looming student loan emails. The bitter hops of a summer ale washed away our problems, reminding us that if Emily Blunt and John Krasinksi found each other, we too can find jobs and futures that welcome us wholeheartedly.

It’s okay that people leave—I think that’s something we rarely hear anymore. Our emphasis so often heads toward the dramatic. Big fights, long-distance forgetfulness, regrets and bitterness over something that used to fill you with so much sweetness. But then there are the people who just left, or maybe you left them. Your lives took you in two different directions and you drifted.

Last winter, as I hid under a blanket and bemoaned the graveyard that is modern dating in the city of Nashville, Tennessee (where every boy is contractually obligated to include in his I-don’t-actually-want-a-relationship script: “But I think you’re really cool!”), I told Chelsey that we should just stop having expectations altogether. Because rarely are expectations met, so why bother having them in the first place? I figured I could protect myself from any future disappointment by kicking expectations out completely. Expect nothing, I argued to her.

Removed from the college bubble and re-planted in a new life, the field is wiped clean again. I have to again make a real, conscious decision about where I fit in and how I stack up. There seem to be metrics in place for who’s “winning” post-grad—high-power job? committed relationship? best apartment? coolest city?—but there’s no prize. New York is enormous, and social media is a daily tidal wave, and there have been days when I feel so small.

I recently went through a breakup. I felt like I was on a train going through a tunnel. I couldn’t see clearly. I couldn’t think clearly. There were no mountains or trees, just a steady presence of hurt and confusion.

It’s been six months since I graduated from university and if I’m perfectly candid, it’s been a rough ride. People keep telling me that it’s okay to not know what you’re doing at this stage in life. “You’re so young, take time to figure it out!”

I have been told some variation of that statement hundreds of times since April. As reassuring as it is to hear, I haven’t felt content with what I’m doing since I was in school. I miss writing every day. I miss being challenged, studying, learning new things and that fly-by-the-seat-of-my pants adrenaline rush I get anytime I’m working under a strict deadline.

I will never forget the night leading up to graduation that I had lain in my apartment crying and texting my brother about not wanting to celebrate my accomplishment. I had been through interview after interview yet had nothing to show for it. I felt like a failure. My parents and I had both invested so much money in this dream of mine and here I was, two weeks from graduating college and only having a part time job paying barely over minimum wage to show for it.

Courtney is graduating with a degree in Journalism and Mass Communications in December 2016 from Iowa State. She’s from small town Iowa and remains captive to the corn state. She is interning at a local grassroots nonprofit that fights domestic sex trafficking and hopes to be a leader in human rights no matter where her career takes her. Her next life goal is to actually write on her website (yay!) and only eat chocolate in moderation (ha!). You can find adorable pictures of her cat Klaus on Insta at @courtneysowder and on her blog Maddest Joy.

Courtney is graduating with a degree in Journalism and Mass Communications in December 2016 from Iowa State. She’s from small town Iowa and remains captive to the corn state. She is interning at a local grassroots nonprofit that fights domestic sex trafficking and hopes to be a leader in human rights no matter where her career takes her. Her next life goal is to actually write on her website (yay!) and only eat chocolate in moderation (ha!). You can find adorable pictures of her cat Klaus on Insta at @courtneysowder and on her blog Maddest Joy.

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